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How much space would 400 dvds take?

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ati

Member
Joined
Aug 4, 2004
I have a collection of over 400 dvd's and i want to rip all of them to a server so i can pick one out when ever i want from any room. How much space would the dvds take up using say, a quality comparable to the dvd itself. Also how would i go about doing this? I don't know the first thing about ripping dvds.
 
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rip it raw.. give or take 4.7gb -9gb+

rip it to divx give or take 1.42gb or 700mb you can choose what sizes you want. those two are just common as they fit on 1 or 2 cds.

but 1.42gb gives really nice quality. no frame skips on either size.
 
I think there is a free Divx program for ripping to avi, but the developer of that has discontinued development and now sells a great program called Omniquiti Lathe. I rip alot of half and hour shows (22 mins) for my dad, and each episode comes less than 150mb, at a good looking resolution on my 19" LCD. So... saying the average DVD is 80 mins of video... just over 200GB.
 
Well, if you ripped just the movie to a 700mb divx/xvid file you're looking at 280gb. If you want higher quality and the AC3 sound track it'll probably be closer 1.4gb per file, making for 560gb. The only problem here is ripping takes time, and on a slower computer it can take quite a while. 400 dvd's is a lot. You're probably looking at a years worth of work to rip them all.

Next option would be to do a straight copy of all the dvds. This will take the least amount of time to build the library, about 5 mins per dvd, but will take the most space. Probably around 2.8tb. yes, terabytes. Similiar option would be to use a program like dvdShrink to shrink them all to ~4.5gb. This would save a little space only needing 1.8tb. This would increase the time per dvd to about 30 mins.

It's up to you. You're either looking at a lot of storage space, or a lot of time.

Plan B: http://www.circuitcity.com/ccd/prod...AFEED->PRODUCTS&cm_ite=1 PRODUCT&cm_keycode=4
This would make every dvd accessible without changing dvd's. Of course this would be only through 1 tv system.
 
I already have a server so thats no option. Of i do rip the dvds, would it rip everything? Kinda like an ISO. the menu, special features, audio selections? If you guys where in my situation what would you pick? Is there a major difference between the 700mb encoded and raw dvd? What about the 1.42gig compared to raw.
 
yea big difference in a 700mb and raw, 1.4 gets closer but still a visible diff. go to 2g and thigs start looking really nice in xvid. this is assuming your keeping the aac audio in all accounts. but all this really depends on if you WANT all those features of the menu, audio selects, etc. what do you want exactly out of this. how exactly do you want it to work. what kinda A/V system will this primarily be used on.
 
not sure if you can compress the entire DVD, menus and all... as stated before, DVD shrink will do it for you, and shrink it down to 4.6gb, and you can set it to save as a single file on your hdd.

Omniquiti Laithe does a 22 min ep in about 8 mins on my system. This is about the only time I would say that a Intel cpu would have an advantage over an AMD. Raw power is an asset here.
 
i find that if i copy a dvd with dvd-shrink, i set all menus and special features to still images(u get the soundtrack and a set of pictures made up from the video) this way it allows more room for the movie, and it comes out at a higher quality. still 4.5GB. i cant see the point in ripping 400dvd's. it would take forever. on my system (slowwwwwwwww) it takes a good hour to decode then encode and burn a full 9GB DVD. but if you have the time and the money..........my opinion would be to copy the ones you want to view the most and just buy afew more dvd players for the rest of the house.

a good site for riping DVD's etc is afterdawn
 
^^Better yet, instead of doing that, re-index the movie and take JUST the main movie and go from there, makes a difference, and then you just put the movie in and it plays.

Shrink will make a reasonable copy of the disc, but for good video don't expect every language, director's cut, etc. etc. But with the movie, and 2 channel and 5 channel audio you're talking about pretty high quality video at 4.7GBx400 = <2TB
 
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